Books by Peter Fritzsche

An award-winning historian presents a cultural history of German-occupied Europe during World War II, as told through the writings of civilians who experienced the horrors of war firsthand.

In this original study of the classic text of urban modernism-the newspaper page-Peter Fritzsche analyzes how reading and writing dramatized Imperial Berlin and anticipated the modernist sensibility that celebrated discontinuity, instability, and transience.

From huge, fragile airships hanging in the sky to dashing young war pilots obsessed with death and destruction, this text describes Germany's perilous romance with aviation, covering the bright idealism of flight and its darker service in total war.

Fritzsche traces twentieth-century history through the remarkable diaries of an ordinary Berliner. Franz Goell wrote of hungry winters during WWI, the Berlin bombing, rapes by Russian soldiers, shockwaves cast by Darwin, Freud, and Einstein, the flexing of U.S. superpower, and the strange lifestyles that marked Germany's transition to modernity.

In this inventive book, Peter Fritzsche explores how Europeans and Americans saw themselves in the drama of history, how they took possession of a past thought to be slipping away, and how they generated countless stories about the sorrowful, eventful paths they chose to follow.

Using diaries and letters as evidence, Fritzsche argues that the essence of Nazism's ideological grip lay in the Volksgemeinschaft-a "people's community" that appealed to Germans to be part of a great project to redress the wrongs of the Versailles treaty, revitalize the country, and cleanse the body politic.